Are Stoics emotionless?

Stoic or stoic: two different words

In everyday English, stoic with a small s describes someone who puts up with pain or trouble without complaining and without showing much of what they feel. The word comes from the name of the philosophical school, which took its own name from the Stoa Poikilē, the Painted Porch in Athens where Zeno began teaching around 300 BCE. Over the centuries the adjective kept one visible trait of the school, calm under hardship, and lost the reasons for it.

Capital-S Stoicism is a philosophy about judgment and character (our plain-English definition covers the rest). Its calm, when it comes, is a by-product of judging things accurately. It is not a face worn over feelings you are keeping out of sight. You can be perfectly stoic in the small-s sense while seething, and by Stoic standards the main work is still undone: the passion is there, only hidden.

The same confusion runs through the words people use as near-synonyms:

Apathetic has an odd history. It descends from the Greek apatheia, freedom from the passions, which is the usual name for the Stoic ideal. In English the word slid toward not caring at all, which is close to the opposite of what the Stoics meant. Epictetus, as the next section shows, used the same Greek root for the thing he did not want to become.

Not like a statue

Epictetus divided a student’s training into three areas. The first, which he calls the chief and most urgent, deals with desire and aversion, where the passions come from; the second deals with duty. Here he sets the two side by side:

George Long translates the Greek pathē as “affects,” and Epictetus is specific about their source: they come only from failing to get what you desire or falling into what you would avoid. In the same paragraph he lists what follows from them, including sorrows, lamentations, envy and jealousy. Those are what the first area of training aims to remove. In the second area he refuses to be apathēs, unfeeling, “like a statue.” A son, a father and a citizen are supposed to care about the people those roles bind them to.

Picture a parent whose teenager is two hours late and not answering. Lying awake rehearsing the worst is the kind of affect Epictetus wants gone. Calling the friends’ parents, then the police if it comes to that, and the hug at the door when the teenager finally walks in belong to the second area. Epictetus asks you to work on the first. He never asks you to stop being a parent.

Marcus Aurelius saw the same combination in one of his teachers, Sextus of Chaeronea:

“Entirely free from passion, and also most affectionate” (Meditations 1.9). Marcus puts the two together without any sense of strain. The absence of anger and the presence of warmth were, for him, parts of one character.

Seneca is the bluntest. In his dialogue On the Firmness of the Wise Man, his whole case is that nothing can wrong or insult a wise person. Yet in chapter 10, as he begins on insults, he stops to admit that heavier things do reach him:

Bodily pain and weakness, the loss of friends and children, the ruin of his country in war: all of these strike the wise person, and Seneca refuses to give him “the hardness of stone or iron.” What sets him apart is what happens after the blow: he rises above it, heals it and brings it to an end. Seneca’s reason is compact: “there is no virtue but is conscious of its own endurance.” If nothing hurt, there would be nothing to endure.

So can Stoics love? On the evidence of their own books, they expected to. Marcus filled the first book of the Meditations with thanks to his family, teachers and friends. Seneca argues in Letter 9 that even a self-sufficient wise person wants friends, less for what a friend can do for him than for the chance to stand by that friend when things go badly (in our words).

How a passion forms: Seneca’s three stages

The best-known ancient account of how a feeling turns into a passion is in Book 2 of Seneca’s On Anger. Anger is his example, but he offers the stages as the way passions in general “begin and swell and gain spirit” (On Anger 2.4).

He opens the book with a question: does anger simply follow the impression that we have been wronged, or does the mind take part? The Stoic answer is that anger can do nothing without the mind’s agreement (2.1). Then he moves the body out of the way:

Turning pale, tears, deep sighs, cold hands before a speech: Seneca calls these “merely impulses of the body.” They happen to the bravest soldier and the best speaker, and on their own they say nothing about the state of the mind. In the chapter before, he gives more examples: shivering when cold water is poured over you, hair standing up at bad news, a blush at crude words, dizziness at the edge of a cliff (2.2). No amount of reasoning prevents them.

Then come the three stages:

Here is the sequence with a modern example: a colleague answers your work with a curt email and copies your manager.

The first stage isn’t up to you; Seneca says reactions of that kind can happen even to the wisest (2.2). By the third it is too late to argue, because the passion has stopped listening. Practice belongs to the second stage. The thought is there, in Seneca’s example “It is my duty to avenge myself, because I have been injured,” but it is not yet obstinate. A man who thinks himself wronged and is then talked out of revenge, Seneca says, has not been angry at all (2.3). The Stoic word for the mind’s agreement, the thing anger cannot do without, is assent. Holding it back for a few minutes, long enough to ask whether your colleague meant to embarrass you or was simply in a hurry, can be the difference between a bad moment and a bad afternoon.

The usual English name for the first stage, “first movement,” translates Seneca’s Latin primus motus. Reactions of this kind are also called propatheiai, “pre-emotions”: they come before assent, so even a wise person can have them (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (opens in a new tab)). Our guide to Stoicism and anger applies the stages to everyday provocations.

What training can’t remove

Seneca comes back to first reactions in a letter to his friend Lucilius. The usual English translations of the Letters are still under copyright in many countries, so here is the app’s paraphrase, labeled as one:

The letter begins with a young friend of Lucilius who blushed while talking with Seneca. Seneca’s point, in our words, is that some reactions come with a person’s nature and stay even after long training: they can be softened, not removed. He doesn’t count the blush against the young man’s philosophy. It is how bodies work.

For a modern reader that is a relief. If your voice shakes when you give a toast, if you go red when someone praises you, if your eyes fill at a graduation, you have not failed at Stoicism, and you have not shown a lack of self-control by showing emotion. Those reactions are the first stage. The philosophy begins with what you agree to next: whether the shaking voice turns into I’m making a fool of myself, I should sit down, or stays a shaking voice that finishes the toast.

The good feelings

The Stoics used passion (Greek pathos) as a technical term, not as a word for any feeling. A passion, in their definition, is an impulse that is excessive and disobeys reason. It rests on a mistaken judgment: that something like money, status or health is truly good or bad, when for the Stoics only character is, and that you must react accordingly (SEP (opens in a new tab)). They sorted the passions into four families: appetite and fear, which look ahead, and pleasure and distress, which concern the present.

A wise person, on their account, is free of all four but not empty. In their place come three “good feelings,” eupatheiai, listed in our sources for the early Stoics (Diogenes Laertius 7.116; Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 4):

Seneca describes what a person with sound principles can expect to feel:

“A continual cheerfulness, a high happiness” (On the Happy Life 4) is not a description of someone who has stopped feeling. It is a steadier kind of feeling, one that doesn’t rise and fall with the next piece of news. Notice the last clause, too. Seneca’s delight and cheerfulness are not themselves the good; they come from it, the way warmth comes from a fire.

Put together, the Stoic picture has three layers. There are first reactions, which everyone has, the wise included. There are passions, which the Stoics tried to unlearn. And there are good feelings, which they hoped to grow into.

Do Stoics cry?

Yes. Seneca lists “bursting into tears” among the impulses of the body that are not yet passions (On Anger 2.3). Writing to Polybius, whose brother had died, he says he will never forbid mourning (Consolation to Polybius 18); what he questioned, in Letters 63 and 99, was grief kept up for show. What the Stoics said about grief reads those writings closely.

Can Stoics be happy?

Happiness was the point of the whole philosophy. The Greek word is eudaimonia, literally having a good daimōn, a good guiding spirit, and Marcus plays on it:

For the Stoics, eudaimonia is a life that goes well because it is lived well, and virtue is the one thing it requires. That puts happiness in the place they thought was fully up to you, your own character, rather than in luck, money or how other people treat you. It is less a mood than a condition, and joy comes with it. Why the Stoics called virtue the only good is explained in the Stoic principles.

The rest of the entry is worth reading as practice. An “imagination,” Long’s word for an impression, has turned up uninvited, out of old habit. Marcus doesn’t argue with it, and he doesn’t pretend it isn’t there. He tells it, without heat, to leave: “I am not angry with thee: only go away” (Meditations 7.17).

How to be more stoic (and what the Stoics meant)

There are two answers, depending on which word you mean.

The lowercase answer is a demeanor: say less, complain less, keep your face still. Some of that has its uses. A nurse in an emergency or a parent driving a hurt child to the hospital needs a steady face. Seneca himself counts keeping anger off your face as a beginning, and suggests a calmer expression, a milder voice and a slower step, because the inside gradually follows the outside (On Anger 3.13, in our words). But for him that was where the work started.

The Stoic answer is a practice aimed at the second stage. In ordinary terms:

1. Notice the first movement and name it plainly. “Face hot, jaw tight.” You didn’t choose it, and it is information, not a verdict.
2. Don’t assent yet. Say the judgment riding along with it in so many words, such as “she’s trying to humiliate me” or “this is going to be a disaster,” and treat it as a proposal rather than a fact.
3. Ask what is up to you. Usually that is your next sentence, your tone and what you do in the next hour. The modern name for this sorting is the dichotomy of control.
4. Look back in the evening. Which first movements turned into passions today, and where did you agree too quickly? The Evening Examination gives that review a shape.

When the feeling is strong and you want the steps laid out for you, the free exercises go further. The Anger exercise separates what happened from the story you added to it, and the Worry exercise separates what you know from what you are imagining. Both are part of I Need Perspective. If strong feelings stay with you for weeks or make ordinary days hard, talk to a doctor or a counselor. That is not a failure at Stoicism, and this page is philosophy, not health care.